Paul Payne

Software Needs a Home # You may have hear the term “Vibe Coding”.

The Dream # I want to talk about you and me, and our, and our society’s relationship with technology.

A lot of my recent thoughts about coding with agents lately (like this, and this, and this) have been circling a specific topic… design.

Don’t distract the engineers # In January, I wrote about how best-practices make software development agents work better.

We saw a massive sell-off of software stocks last week, partially in response to Anthropic’s claim that 100% of their code is now written by AI and the release of a couple of new products for lawyers and office workers.

There’s a charged debate happening right now about whether or not coding agents are worth a damn.

I’m calling it.

At the beginning of the year I became increasingly concerned with the state of civil society here in the U.S. and around the world.

For now, the intelligence in our systems remains distinctly human.

How the 2025 presidential inauguration reflected a breach of social contract by big tech and one person’s first steps at reclaiming their digital autonomy.

Current work # I am a Principal Research Engineer at Microsoft in the Office of the CTO.

“a beautiful photo of a memory system, neurons, warm and comforting” –Midjourney Imagine for a moment life without memory.

“an abstract illustration of consciousness studies, timeline, gradient” –Midjourney Early Investigations # In our investigations of creating machine minds, let’s start with a quick survey of previous thinking on the topic.

Let’s talk about the suitability of LLMs (Large Language Models) for exploring thinking machines.

“surrealist painting of the creation of an autonomous agent, machinery, consciousness” -Midjourney The simplest agent one can build might be: def hi(): print(“hello”) This exhibits the behavior one would expect of an agent in the world.

Cover: “photo of a boy on the floor reading an old encyclopedia, sunlight, scattered toys, 80s” –Midjourney I hope these articles will open collaboration with others of you who share my interests.

“a blueprint of a synthetic memory machine” –Midjourney ChatGPT is Forgetful # ChatGPT is forgetful.

“A beautiful technical drawing of artificial cognition architecture. muted pastel lines with neon accents on a white background…” -Midjourney This newsletter will chronicle my research into understanding consciousness, specifically through the lens of cra…